Twitter said Monday it has agreed to acquire TapCommerce a mobile advertising company focused on re-engaging people who have downloaded advertisers’ apps.
The financial terms of the proposed acquisition of the New York startup were not disclosed. Some reports, however, said Twitter is paying about US$100 million for the company.
Twitter also announced Monday the global rollout of its “mobile app installs” program, which allows companies to promote their mobile apps in users’ feeds.
The company has been beefing its mobile advertising offerings including through the purchase of mobile-focused advertising exchange MoPub last year and of Namo Media, a provider of native advertising in apps, earlier this month.
“Advertisers spend aggressively to get new users, but re-activating existing or previous users can provide just as attractive a return on investment,” Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s vice president for online sales said in a blog post announcing the acquisition of TapCommerce.
Advertisers will be able to drive conversions and return-on-investment with mobile consumers on and off Twitter by both acquiring new users through app installs and also engaging existing users who already have the advertisers’ apps on their device, he added.
On its website, TapCommerce, which has eBay and Zulily among its customers, gives the example of an online retailer that wanted to drive more sales through its iOS app by addressing past mobile shoppers. TapCommerce identified the retailer’s mobile users who had previously used the app and were likely to make a purchase, and re-engaged them with individually customized, “re-targeted” ads of what they had browsed before, which were presented in a variety of contexts including other mobile apps.
The TapCommerce platform now processes over 15 billion targeted ad impression bids each day, across 50,000 apps worldwide, CEO and cofounder Brian Long said in a post.